Dana Stevens

The way that Redford’s character — who for all his namelessness and near-wordlessness emerges as a distinct character, a calm, pragmatic, curious man with a dry sense of humor — struggles with that ultimate question is the beating heart of All is Lost, which somewhere in its second hour goes from being a good movie to being a great one.

As it moves toward an ambiguous and haunting finale, The Banshees of Inisherin has the fanciful yet gruesome quality of a folk tale or fairytale, a mood enhanced by Carter Burwell’s harp-and-flute-heavy score and Ben Davis’ painterly widescreen cinematography.

It represents something stranger and, to those of us with only a secondhand or thirdhand knowledge of that history, more disturbing: a survivor's conviction that there were aspects of the experience itself that can only be described as beautiful.

Certainly one of the strangest and most interesting movies of the year, and I suspect that in years to come a number of other strange and interesting movies will show traces of its influence.

The heart of Life Itself, and the part of the film that’s most instructive even for those familiar with Ebert’s story, is the long middle section dealing with his stormy, never-resolved relationship with Gene Siskel.

Even if you’re not transported by every minute of the film’s story, though, del Toro creates such a sumptuous visual world that it’s impossible to take your eyes off the screen.

While this film can seem politically simplistic, it is nonetheless psychologically astute, and more complicated than it at first appears.

It's to the director's credit, and Pitt's, that Moneyball is anything but bloodless - in its own quiet, unspectacular way, this movie courses with life.

Its effects seem more like those of a poem or a piece of music than a movie. Requires the reverent darkness and communal solitude of a theater.

As the couple’s widening rift exposes the gender and class assumptions that underlie their marriage... Force Majeure morphs into a biting critique of modern masculinity, of traditional parenting roles, and possibly of the institution of marriage itself.

A work of inspired simplicity.

Jody's story is told with so much heart -- and his character is acted with such a winning combination of playfulness, vulnerability and sexual dynamism by Mr. Gibson -- that you can forgive the occasionally incoherent storytelling, the overwrought moments and the haphazard, unconvincing excursions into dream and fantasy.

A sneaky slice-of-life indie that comes on all casual and cinéma-verité in the early scenes, then slowly coalesces into a romantic comedy as intricately constructed as any door-slamming stage farce.

Represents the usual victory of simplistic screenwriting conventions over the rich, gamy ambiguities of the subject. But while its slide into perfunctory storytelling dilutes the raw, silly spectacle of sex and noise, the movie still has enough wit and insight to make it worth watching.

Though it goes to places as dark as any you could imagine, Room carries at its heart a message of hope: Two people in four walls can create a world worth surviving for, if they love each other enough.

I’ve always admired this director’s commitment to both seriousness and laughter, to showing the beauty and significance of ordinary human life side by side with its petty, venal absurdity.

Mr. Ozon gives the movie to Ms. Rampling, whose performance is like a perfectly executed piano etude, finding precise, impossibly subtle shadings of pleasure, confusion and distress.

With its careful, unassuming naturalism, its visual thrift and its emotional directness, Million Dollar Baby feels at once contemporary and classical, a work of utter mastery that at the same time has nothing in particular to prove.

The Babadook creates tension not with jump scares or chase sequences but with judicious editing and slow-burn suspense—that is, until it descends into a final half-hour of harrowing emotional and physical intensity, an extended climax that made me gasp aloud, hide my eyes, and weep at least twice.

The movie we've been waiting for all year: a comedy that doesn't take cheap shots, a drama that doesn't manipulate, a movie of ideas that doesn't preach. It's a rich, layered, juicy film, with quiet revelations punctuated by big laughs.

If you're interested in the history of the human race-if you're a member of the human race-you owe it to yourself to see this movie.

Offers the rare pleasure of watching a major director return to his own material and rework it 30 years later. This story of a pitiful jewel heist gone so profoundly wrong that it approaches the scope of Greek tragedy isn't quite a remake of "Dog Day Afternoon."

This film’s honesty and urgency feel both providential and grimly prophetic.

This movie keeps a lot of balls in the air: generational and cultural conflict, hospital drama, screwball banter — and only rarely lets one drop.

Argo isn't quite on the level of the Sidney Lumet classics to which Affleck pays stylistic homage - smart and taut as it is, it lacks the broader political vision of a film like "Dog Day Afternoon." But Lumet lite still goes down pretty smooth.

The Master is above all a love story between Joaquin Phoenix's damaged WWII vet, Freddie Quell, and Philip Seymour Hoffmann's charismatic charlatan, Lancaster Dodd. And that relationship is powerful and funny and twisted and strange enough that maybe that's all the movie needs to be about.

Los Angeles Plays Itself, in spite of its length, is rarely tedious, an achievement it owes mainly to the movies it prodigiously excerpts.

Though it’s only two hours and 13 minutes long, Sentimental Value packs a whole novel’s worth of emotional texture and telling visual detail into that run time; you leave feeling as if you’ve witnessed multiple generations of one family’s life, observing the way behavior patterns and trauma get passed down.

To call The Son a masterpiece would be to insult its modesty. Like the homely, useful boxes Olivier teaches his prodigals to build, it is sturdy, durable and, in its downcast, unobtrusive way, miraculous.

May be the most necessary film you'll see this year. But if you go to the movies in search of emotion rather than edification, don't let that word necessary deter you, because this is also one of the most engaging films you'll see this year, full of vibrant, complex real-life characters whose troubles and joys will stay with you long after the movie's done.

Z makes political intelligence seem chicer than skinny neckties.

It's hard not to admire Zeitlin's ambitious vision, his do-it-yourself aesthetic, and the commitment of his cast and crew - a kind of utopian collective whose jobs often overlapped, as the local, nonprofessional actors collaborated on set-building and other technical tasks. But that doesn't mean the result of their labor is exactly what you'd call a "good movie."

She (Varda) plucks images and stories from the world around her, finding beauty and nourishment in lives and activities the world prefers to ignore.

It's always hard to predict how a work of art will age over time, but I have the feeling that, like its three young leads, the Harry Potter series will turn out just fine.

The two storylines interweave seamlessly and subtly, the couple's real-life problems not so much repeating as refracting the experiences of their fictional counterparts.

Polanski, who was a Jewish child in Krakow when the Germans arrived in September 1939, presents Szpilman's story with bleak, acid humor and with a ruthless objectivity that encompasses both cynicism and compassion.

The most surprising thing about West Side Story, Spielberg’s most dynamic movie in years, is how at home the director seems in a genre he has never before worked in. The balance between realism and stylization necessitated by the show is so confidently handled you wonder why he waited until age 74 to start making musicals.

Amy Winehouse’s story is a tragic one — as with Kurt Cobain, who also died at 27, her potential as a singer and songwriter was only just beginning to be realized. Yet the prevailing mood of this documentary is joy. Kapadia captures what was irreplaceable about this unique performer, and in the process gives her the opportunity to do what she was made to do, the only thing she ever really wanted: to sing.

As she's being put through her Oxford-prep paces, Jenny complains about "ticking off boxes," and at times, this film seems to be doing just that: coming-of-age drama, check. Youthful illusions shattered, check. But as with first love, so with the movies: The right girl makes it all worthwhile.

The tale, in any case, is so gripping, so full of improbable turns and agonizing reversals that it bears repeating, and Mr. Butler and Ms. Alexander tell it straightforwardly and well.

Impressive as Burnham’s achievement is, Eighth Grade could never hit the heights it does without the right actress in the demanding lead role.

An exquisitely simple movie. Mr. Kim manages to isolate something essential about human nature and at the same time, even more astonishingly, to comprehend the scope of human experience.

The film's best moments are the quiet ones in which Oldman's ironically named Smiley provides the story with its wise, unsmiling soul.

If this unusually thoughtful exploration of parenthood, emotional connection, and the coexistence of nature and technology is the only installment we get, load your offspring onto your back and tote them to the movie theater while you can.

Holy Motors, a movie that's beyond weird, and beyond beautiful.

The middle section of the film, in which we follow Jack's childhood in a series of fragmented memories from birth until about the age of 12, is as astonishingly precise a rendering of the way the world looks to a child as I've seen on film.

Embedded in this seeming valentine to the movies is something pricklier, sadder, and smarter.

This is a grippingly original work, with gorgeous cinematography by Christopher Blauvelt, and the first hour or more achieves something like greatness.

Fruitvale Station’s wrenching power lies in the specificity of its storytelling and the ordinary human warmth of the world it conjures. You walk out of it, not shaking your head over an abstract social problem, but grieving the senseless death of one flawed, complex, tragically young man.

Hathaway transcends her usual complacency in this role and resists the temptation of using Kym's (and her own) wounded-bird appeal to let the character off the hook.

The political implications of the film are manifest, as is the quiet courage of making it.

A stylish, ingeniously constructed bit of hokum, a sparkling trinket of a movie that's as implausible as it is irresistible.

A tough and touching exploration of honor and friendship among thieves.

Craig’s adaptation treats Margaret’s religious questioning with as much curiosity and respect as it does her budding sexuality.

Like the great films of the 1930's and early 40's, it is at once artful and unpretentious, sophisticated and completely accessible, sure of its own authority and generous toward characters and audience alike -- a movie whose intended public is the human race.

It’s fine to walk out of this movie not quite sure what Tarantino was using his story’s proximity to this real-life tragedy to say; that’s part of the ambiguity inherent in making art. But it’s dispiriting to suspect that part of why he wanted to stage a Manson-adjacent story was because the accoutrements — the period cars and costumes and neon signs, the glowering barefoot hippie girls, the acid-laced cigarettes and glowing movie marquees — were just so cool.

Moonrise Kingdom is fun: a gorgeously shot, ingeniously crafted, über-Andersonian bonbon that, even in its most irritatingly whimsical moments, remains an effective deliverer of cinematic pleasure.

It’s both a wildly ambitious meditation on American history and a rip-roaring good time.

It’s a teen sex romp well suited for the summer of 2019: feminist but not preachy, raunchy but not nasty, emotionally intelligent but not sentimental.

Astonishingly well acted film, so much so that it seems unfair to single out any of the performances. Mr. Lawrence's camera sense is as sure and unobtrusive as his feel for acting. The movie just seems to happen, to grow out of the ground like a thorny plant, revealing the intricate intelligence of its design only in hindsight.

It rediscovers the aching, desiring humanity in a genre -- and a period-- too often subjected to easy parody or ironic appropriation. In a word, it's divine.

It bounces along at such an antic pace that its 100 minutes feel like far fewer. But there’s a quiet contemplativeness at the movie’s heart, exemplified by a long scene in which Woody and Forky make their way along the shoulder of a highway, plastic hand in pipe-cleaner hand, discussing the meaning of life as a plaything.

Mr. Sauper has produced an extraordinary work of visual journalism, a richly illustrated report on a distant catastrophe that is also one of the central stories of our time.

This movie succeeds at the hardest task a movie musical needs to pull off: the musical numbers, with few exceptions, soar in the way an in-story song has to soar to convince us that, given this situation and these characters, “randomly bursting into song” is a perfectly sensible thing to do.

A sensitive adaptation full of beautifully judged performances that nonetheless fails to maintain the essential appeal of its own source material: the quietly feminist retelling of one of the most retold lives in history from the perspective of a woman who was central to that life, while figuring almost nowhere in the record of it.

Looper felt to me like a maddening near-miss: It posits an impossible but fascinating-to-imagine relationship...and then throws away nearly all the dramatic potential that relationship offers. If someone remakes Looper as the movie it could have been in, say, 30 years, will someone from the future please FedEx it back to me?

Ramsay’s fourth feature operates on the viewer in much the same way. With a minimum of resources, she creates a primal atmosphere of dread, then assaults the viewer’s consciousness in a single, sharp blow.

In its brief sojourn on the screen, A Ghost Story moves through centuries of geologic time and into the deepest recesses of the human heart.

McQueen has created a tense and satisfying action drama with a decidedly feminist bent.

It's such a disappointment that The Descendants isn't a better movie than it is. In this soap opera disguised as a comedy, Payne, who was always a master at balancing sharp satire with an essential humanism, has traded his tart lemon center for a squishy marshmallow one.

First Man doesn’t display a lot of interest in Neil’s social world. Chazelle, like his hero, sometimes seems to be just biding time until he can get back into one of those claustrophobic space modules and feel gravity slipping away.

Snowpiercer is its own strange, special thing, a movie that seems to have been sent back to us from some distant alternate future where grandiose summer action movies can also be lovingly crafted, thematically ambitious works of art.

If you get caught between the moon and New York City--or even just between two movies at the multiplex--the best that you can do is skip this one.

Mystic River is the rare American movie that aspires to -- and achieves -- the full weight and darkness of tragedy.

Neither the neighborhood intimacy of "Mean Streets" nor the grandeur of the "Godfather" movies is imaginable without Visconti's example. Its richness, though, is inexhaustible, and well served by the spotless new 35-millimeter print being shown at Film Forum.

Brooks has given us the rare contemporary rom-com that's by turns (if intermittently) thoughtful and funny, and that doesn't feel focus-grouped, cynical, misogynist, or mean. It seems ungenerous not to cut such a generous movie a break.

Has a quiet, cumulative magic, whose source is hard to identify. Its simple, meticulously composed frames are full of mystery and feeling; it's an action movie that stands perfectly still.

I will say—with as much clarity as I can muster through the tears once again blurring my vision—that the final 15 minutes or so of His Three Daughters are what lifts the movie out of “impressively fine-tuned family drama starring three excellent actresses” into the stratosphere of “transcendent work of art whose insights into the meaning of human impermanence you may want to change your life to be worthy of.

A package of cinematic Pop Rocks, a neon-hued, defiantly non-nutritive confection that nonetheless makes you laugh at its sheer bold novelty.

This movie operates in the limbo between memory and oblivion that we recognize as daily life. It bears courageous and stringent witness to the impossibility of bearing witness.

I realize that the fear of contracting writer's block from a fictional character is crazy, but in the brilliantly scrambled, self-consuming world of Adaptation it has a certain plausibility.

The movie’s soulful self-seriousness, like that of its liquid-eyed hero, can occasionally slip into self-parody. But this movie confirms my "Blue Valentine"-based suspicion that the 38-year-old Cianfrance is one to watch. He’s capable of coaxing tremendous moments from actors, he knows how to move a camera, and as this over-laden but never boring movie shows, he’s willing to operate from a place of risk.

This is by far the best film in the more recent trilogy, and also the best of the four episodes Mr. Lucas has directed. That's right (and my inner 11-year-old shudders as I type this): it's better than "Star Wars."

In the end Amen is neither as moving nor as illuminating as it should be. It suffers especially when compared -- as is inevitable, given the closeness of their release dates -- with "The Pianist," Roman Polanski's movie about a Polish Jew during the Nazi occupation.

I wouldn't recommend Hitchcock to cinephiles seeking a bold new take on the master's life or work, but if all you want is to while away the afternoon in the company of some excellent actors in plummy period costume, Gervasi's film is not without its pleasures.

Though it’s just slightly over two hours long, The Wind Rises has the historical sweep of a David Lean picture, complete with panoramic shots of migrating populations against a background of disaster and a romantic orchestral score by Miyazaki’s longtime musical collaborator, Joe Hisaishi.

So wrenching and absorbing that you can easily lose sight of the sophistication of its techniques.

Osama's unvarnished vulnerability, along with the director's combination of tough-mindedness and lyricism, prevents the movie from becoming at all sentimental; instead, it is beautiful, thoughtful and almost unbearably sad.

That the studio gave a first-time director the freedom to explore these potentially sensitive themes, and to do so in a tone that is boisterous and playful rather than handwringing or self-serious, is a promising sign for Pixar’s future.

I'll be forever grateful to this movie for introducing me to Nim's story, a tale so powerful and suggestive that it functions as a myth about the ever-mysterious relationship between human beings and animals.

Though it’s often cited on lists of the greatest sports movies, or horse movies, or movies for children—all citations this magnificent film deserves—National Velvet is perhaps dearest to me for its lovingly detailed and precise portrait of this very particular mother-daughter relationship, and for the intertwined performances of the dry, laconic Revere and the tremulously radiant Taylor (who was already, at age 12, a sophisticated and sensitive actress).

At first fascinating and never less than bonkers movie is eventually sunk by its own theological overreach.

Better than its predecessor, and also superior to most other comic-book-based movies. It has a more credible (and more frightening) villain, a more capacious and original story and a self-confidence based not only on the huge success of the first "Spider-Man" but also on Mr. Raimi's intuitive and enthusiastic grasp of the material.

Is it or is it not stupendously friggin' rad? And the answer is yes. For most of the first hour, a good portion of the second, and even many of the 40 minutes left after that, Avatar is stupendously friggin' rad.

Somehow, for me, this earnest, pretty movie never came to life on screen; it remained a curio in a cabinet, to be admired through a pane of glass.

A clever, vividly imagined, consistently funny, eye-poppingly pretty and oddly profound movie … about Legos.

Gus Van Sant and screenwriter Dustin Lance Black pull off something very close to magic. They make a film that's both historically precise and as graceful, unpredictable, and moving as a good fiction film--that is to say, a work of art.

David Cronenberg's elegant treatise on the metaphysics of violence.